Five Years of Francis: The Impact of a Historic Papacy

March 11, 3-5 pmFordham Preparatory School Leonard Theatre
Located on the Rose Hill Campus of Fordham University

Celebrating the 5-year anniversary of Pope Francis' installation as head of the Roman Catholic Church, America Media and Fordham Preparatory School host a conversation about this historic papacy featuring:

Chris Lowney, best-selling author and international speaker

David Gonzalez, award-winning journalist at the New York Times

Dr. Meghan Clark, PhD, associate professor of moral theology at St. John's University

[Moderated by Maurice Timothy Reidy '93, Executive Editor of America. Chris Lowney will hold a book signing immediately following the panel discussion.]

Chris Lowney chairs the board of Catholic Health Initiatives, one of the nation’s largest healthcare/hospital systems. He is a one-time Jesuit seminarian who later served as a Managing Director of J.P. Morgan & Co in New York, Tokyo, Singapore and London until leaving the firm in 2001. He is a popular keynote speaker who has lectured in more than two-dozen countries on leadership, business ethics, decision-making and other topics. He is the author of four books. Heroic Leadership, a bestseller, was named a finalist for a 2003 Book of the Year Award from ForeWord magazine. He is also author of Heroic Living and A Vanished World. His latest work, Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads, has been called, “an invaluable gift,” and “a book for the ages.” He served as volunteer founding president of Jesuit Commons, an innovative collaboration which offers online university education in refugee camps in Africa and elsewhere. He conceived and co-founded Contemplative Leaders in Action, an emerging leader formation program now active in a half-dozen cities. He founded Pilgrimage for Our Children’s Future, which funds education and healthcare projects in the developing world. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Fordham University, where he also received his MA and holds five honorary Doctoral degrees.

Since arriving at The New York Times in 1990 from Newsweek Magazine – where he had been a national correspondent in Detroit and Miami – David Gonzalez has served as The Times’s Bronx Bureau Chief, Metro Religion writer, About New York columnist and the Central America/Caribbean Bureau Chief. As a long-time member of the Metro desk of The New York Times, his work has often focused on the city’s neighborhoods and how they reflect the larger social and cultural issues in American society. As Central America/Caribbean Bureau Chief, he reported often from Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Among his stories were in-depth reports on overdevelopment in Central American cities, AIDS in the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s ongoing political and social crises and the fight against impunity in post-war Guatemala. In 2008 he received the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for House Afire, a groundbreaking three-part series on the life of a struggling Pentecostal storefront church. His feature writing has been honored twice by Columbia University’s Workshops on Race and Ethnicity. He also was awarded Columbia University’s Mike Berger Award in May 1992 for his coverage of New York City and its neighborhoods. In 2013, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He was born and raised in the Bronx, where he attended Cardinal Hayes High School. He earned a BA from Yale University in 1979 and an MA in Journalism from Columbia University.

Dr. Clark received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1999 from Fordham University and a Doctor of Philosophy (2009) in Theological Ethics from Boston College. Dr. Clark joined the faculty at St. John’s University as an assistant professor of moral theology in 2011. In 2013, Dr. Clark was appointed as a Fellow of the Institute of Policy Research and Catholic Studies at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. Currently, she serves as a faculty expert for the Holy See’s Mission to the United Nations coordinated by St. John’s Vincentian Center for Church and Society. In addition, she is on the Board of Directors of America Press, Inc and the faculty advisory board for Catholic Relief Services “CRS University” Global Solidarity Network. In 2014, she joined the editorial board of the Journal of Moral Theologyand the Bioethics Administrative Team for the Catholic Theological Society of America. She is author of The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: the Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights (Fortress Press, 2014). Her research has been published in Political Theology, Heythrop Journal, New Blackfriars and the Journal of Catholic Social Thought. Active in public theology, she is a columnist for US Catholic magazine and blogs at Catholic Moral Theology and Millennial Journal.

Moderator Biography:

Maurice Timothy Reidy, Prep Class of 1993, is an executive editor of America: The Jesuit Review of Faith and Culture. He is a graduate of Fordham Preparatory School, Princeton University and the Columbia University School of Journalism. He previously worked as a staff writer for the Hartford Courant and as an associate editor at Commonweal magazine. Tim's writing has been published in Commonweal, The New York Times and the Columbia Journalism Review. He has appeared on Bloomberg TV and ABC News Digital to discuss the pontificate of Pope Francis. He currently serves on the board of Jesuit Refugee Service USA and lives in Bronxville, New York, with his wife and two children.